


Tony Stark Hates Magic

by coffee_mage



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: NOT FrostIron, Tony Stark doesn't care when he's naked, Tony Stark's endless snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-07 23:21:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1125582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffee_mage/pseuds/coffee_mage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark, naked and defenseless when a tall, familiar person shows up in his bathroom.  All he wanted was a nice soak in his jacuzzi.  What he got was an opportunity to foil a vengeful goddess.  Not ideal, but still a win, he thinks.</p><p>For a three word prompt given by a friend: Sparkle, chocolate and sci-fi</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tony Stark Hates Magic

Tony sank into the hot whirling bubbles of his jacuzzi, sighing as the warm water hit aching muscles.  Another day, another army of Doombots.  Doombots.  Seriously.  They existed.  And Doom could get away with them.  He was sure that was not how they meant for diplomatic immunity to work.  He was pretty much sure of it, in fact.  Stupid Doom.  Stupid Doombots.  Stupid Reed Richards, starting up a stupid feud he couldn’t follow through on.  

Tony was way smarter than Richards, fuck the IQ scores.  Tony took his nemeses down and made sure they weren’t coming back.  Richards just let his nemeses wander around, gleefully destroying Central Park and leaving Tony bruised and abused.  He was so sending the materials bill for suit repairs to Richards.  Stupid Richards and his stupid stupidness.  And Pepper always making him play nice when he saw the jerk.  He loved her, but she was wrong about Richards.  There was no point in making nice with him.

Tony grumbled, sinking further into the jacuzzi and watching the sparkle of the water’s broken reflection on the ceiling.  He needed to come up with something that could defend against magic.  Ugh.  Magic.  He hated magic.  And Doombots, he was pretty sure, were at least partly held together with magic.  Since when was his life sci-fi?  He liked hard science, things that made sense, that could be calculated, unravelled.  Magic was just fairytales, fiction.  Foster could claim all she liked that it was science, but it was science fiction at best, fairytales that could make his armour drop ten stories with no discernible malfunction.  Yes.  Tony Stark really hated magic.  He should make a t-shirt.  Sell it.  Give the proceeds to victims of magical crimes.  And then he’d have an excuse to wear t-shirts that said ‘I hate magic and it’s stupid’ whenever he wanted.  Well.  Something to that effect.  He could work out the wording later.

He was drawn out of his rage reverie by the scent of chocolate.  Which was strange.  He was on a cleanse.  There was no chocolate anywhere to be found in his rooms.  He sat up and looked around for the source of the aroma.  A tall, slim woman in a green blouse, with black hair shimmering nearly to her waist was standing in the doorway to his bathroom, eating a candy bar.  There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

“My personal suite is off limits,” he said firmly.  “JARVIS, why didn’t you alert me?”

There was no answer, save for the woman’s slowly widening smile.  

“JARVIS, unmute!”  Tony could feel his breathing speed up.  Something was wrong.  Something was very, very wrong.  JARVIS was compromised and this woman was responsible and dammit, he wasn’t getting murdered in his bathtub.

“Are you alarmed?” the woman asked, and the cadence of her voice combined with the smile on her face made Tony’s stomach clench.

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” she said.

“I have to say, your originality hasn’t skyrocketed since the last time we hang out.”  Tony reached for a towel, standing up.

She smirked at him, eyes trailing down to linger at his crotch as if judging.

“Oh please.  Seriously on the originality thing.  I’ve seen your brother’s arms, I can’t hope to compete with Asgardian men, blah blah blah, get a new line.  I may not be the biggest man on the planet, but I know how to use it and that’s more than I’ll bet I can say about most of your people.”

“They are hardly my people.” Her eyes shot up to his face, her lips pinching and thinning in disgust.

“Blah blah blah, daddy issues, brother issues, mommy issues, family issues, racism, blah.  You’re not fooling anyone.”  He stepped out of the tub, drying his shoulders and giving the rest of him a cursory swipe before dropping the towel on the floor.  She’d seen what he had, no point in faking modesty he’d never possessed in the first place.  It wasn’t like it was nothing she’d ever seen before.

“Fooling anyone with what?”

“New face, new threads, you got a new name to go with all that?”

“Why would I change my name?  My name brings fear.”

“Your name brings loathing and a whole bunch of ridiculous internet memes people use to distract themselves from your epic property damage.  That’s not the same as fear.  And I don’t know why you’d change your name, but Pepper made me sit through sensitivity training, so I wouldn’t want to misaddress you and have you take your ridiculous obsession with being a thorn in everyone’s side to the legal arena.  I hate lawsuits.  They’re boring.”

“You’re going to continue taunting me to my face when you are as defenseless as a simpering child?”

“I’m not taunting you.  Taunting you would be calling you names that implied that the changes you made weren’t valid.  I asked important questions to avoid misgendering you or disrespecting changes you’ve made.  That’s the opposite of taunting.”  Tony stood in front of her boldly, staring up into her eyes.

“You mortals are so foolish.  I could kill you with scarcely a thought and you stand there trying to bury me in meaningless words?”  

“The whole point of sensitivity training was that they aren’t meaningless words, but my point is, you’re not going to kill me, or you are going to kill me.  I’m doubting the former, however, because I’m standing here with my testicles crawling into my abdominal cavity thanks to the cooling effects of evaporation.  Standing.  As opposed to lying face down on the floor getting my final hard-on.”  Tony shrugged casually, still meeting her gaze.  He was so going to die.  He so hoped that JARVIS would come back online and be able to keep Pepper from finding the body.  If he survived this, that needed to be a new protocol.  ‘Don’t let Pepper be the one to find the body.’  Good plan.  

“You don’t wonder what I’m doing here?” she asked, dropping her candy bar wrapper to the floor carelessly.

Tony watched it fall, then smirked at her.  “You mean other than littering?  Is this how the mighty Loki has fallen?  From God of Mischief to maker of minor environmental inconveniences?”

She gave him a disgusted look that was edging into fury.  “Would that I didn’t have a plan for you.”

His eyebrows shot up in mock surprise and he clapped a hand over his heart.  “A plan, she says.  Oh gasp and shock, the vengeful goddess in my bathroom who hasn’t killed me yet has a plan for me!”

“Your heart is unshielded, fool.  And without anyone knowing I’m alive, I will be free to take whatever I need from your mind and watch until the time is right to take this planet out from under your protection.”

Tony’s heart started to race.  Okay.  Maybe he’d been too hasty on that whole ‘get rid of the arc reactor’ thing.  Sure, it was annoying when he was trying to sleep and it made a whole bunch of things absolutely miserable and it was a reminder of pretty much the worst things that had ever happened to him and oh, yeah, the mind controlling god was dead, but oh, hey, no she wasn’t.

“Now I see it.  Fear.”  Her smile came back.

“You lack glowy stick of slavery,” he pointed out, trying to find a hole in her plan.

“Women weave fates.  I no longer need a device.  All I need are my bare hands.”  She turned her palms out in front of her.

Well shit.  Shit, crap and a side of fuck.  This was bad.  This was worse than dying.  This was way worse than dying.  But there was a chance, however small.  One tiny, minuscule chance that maybe, just maybe, he could stop her.  Sure, she’d probably kill him, but maybe, perhaps, he could stop her.  It would take careful timing and a whole lot of luck that he hadn’t screwed up his calculations and that it would work.  He needed more scans before a trial, but he was out of time.

She took a step towards him, hands outstretched, light flaring on her fingertips.  He stared at her hands in what he hoped looked like terror and what was actually concentration.  It wasn’t working.  It wasn’t working.  Shit.  He’d made a mistake.  Her hands were nearly on his chest, another eighth of an inch and she’d—

Gold flowed out through his skin, smoothing into slick, skin-hugging underarmour and oh.  Oh that was hugging his balls, that was a miscalculation, if he survived, he needed to tweak things, because that was weird and—Totally distracting.  Not the time to get distracted.  

“What have you done?” she demanded through clenched teeth, fingertips flaring brighter.

“Under armour.  It’ll wire control to the Iron Man suits directly through my brain with full mental control.  It’s stored in my bones.”  He didn’t even have to feign the smugness.  Because hey, it was working.  Thank you Extremis!  He might just survive.  Well.  Until Pepper found out what he’d done.  But hey, this was good!  Pepper was scarier than Loki again.  He smiled.

She hit him with a percussive blast from her hands and he flew backwards, leaving a dent in the wall.  He wasn’t so much as winded thanks to the impressive hardness of the under armour protecting him.  No more squishy businessman under the armour!

“Now that?  That shook the walls.  That means in about five minutes, people will come.  And your brother’s been holed up with Foster for about four hours, which means he’s going to be naked and crabby.  So you might want to get out of here.”

“This isn’t over,” she snarled, shooting another blast that aimlessly destroyed part of his bathroom.

“Uh huh.  That’s a getaway phrase if I ever heard one.  Originality, not your forté.  Bye!”  He waved fingertips at her.

With another furious glare, she disappeared.

Tony heaved a sigh of relief.  “JARVIS?” he said.

“I seem to have had a malfunction, sir.  I’m missing approximately six minutes.”  JARVIS sounded confused and disoriented.

“Magic.  Let the others know not to come barging in here until I get dressed?  Cap might faint at the nudity.”

“I highly doubt that’s the case.  I see you have engaged the under armour?  Are you sure that was wise?  We haven’t done any controlled testing.”

“Loki was here.”

“He’s dead, sir, are you certain it was really him?”

“He’s a she now and yes.  The temper tantrum was unmistakeable.”  

“I have relayed this to the others and Captain Rogers says that you have five minutes to show yourself.”

“I’ll be there in three.  JARVIS, make a note?”

“Of course.  Recording.”

“I need to come up with a t-shirt slogan about how much I hate magic.”


End file.
